The Left Bank

In 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met with several big Hollywood players to talk about getting the idea of “militant liberty” into movies. John Wayne was eager.

That anecdote is told in Joel Whitney’s new book, “Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers.” It may not surprise that the Duke was on board with Uncle Sam, but Whitney’s primary focus is on the government’s relationship with a less likely band of double agents: writers and editors at The Paris Review.

In an article for Salon in 2012, Whitney plumbed the depths of the literary magazine’s ties to the C.I.A. Peter Matthiessen, one of the magazine’s founding editors, had long admitted his own experience with the agency. (His ties were first brought to light in The Times in 1977.) But he, George Plimpton and others involved with the magazine long claimed that it was not directly influenced by the C.I.A.

What Whitney found, and expounds on in the book, is that editors were in a relationship that, “from the very beginning, blurs the line between criticism, journalism and the needs of the state; between aesthetics and the political requirements of the Cold War.”

The full story is a fascinating mix of political history, literary history and the ways in which the C.I.A.’s Congress for Cultural Freedom attempted, as one Yale professor put it, to “convince the wavering peoples of the world that we have something infinitely better than Communism.”

“Exposing these ties is not for the purpose of moral condemnation,” Whitney writes in his introduction. “It marks my attempt to look through a keyhole into the vast engine room of the cultural Cold War, to see if this ideology — one favoring paranoid intervention into the media over adherence to democratic principle — remains with us.”

Quotable

“The nice thing about my life is that it’s pretty boring, which is really how you want your life to be — but not how you want your novel to be. So in fact, this really is . . . very, very made up.” — Laurie Frankel, on her novel “This Is How It Always Is,” in an interview with NPR

An Oversize Chorus

Colson Whitehead reviews George Saunders’s first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” on our cover this week. The audio version of the book is . . . crowded. Saunders enlisted 166 different people to record it, one for each separate voice in the book. The resulting cavalcade includes actors and writers like Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Lena Dunham and many others, but also the author’s friends, family and members of his publishing team. Saunders recently told Time: “I love the way that the variety of contemporary American voices mimics and underscores the feeling I tried to evoke in the book: a sort of American chorale.”